


since feeling is first

by extasiswings



Category: The Hour (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-11
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:27:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23099314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/extasiswings/pseuds/extasiswings
Summary: Prompt: "Love has two faces: one of them is the face of devastation."
Relationships: Freddie Lyon/Bel Rowley, Randall Brown/Lix Storm
Comments: 5
Kudos: 15





	since feeling is first

When all is said and done—the lights off in the studio, the commotion in the halls filtered away, even the gossip-mongers gone home for the night—Lix goes to the hospital. There’s nothing to be done with Freddie still in surgery and likely to stay there for several more hours, but Bel is there, ghostly pale and fraying at the seams, and it is no great hardship to sit with her through the night. Where else is she meant to go? Home? With its bare walls and echoing emptiness? Or perhaps back to the studio? Where Lix can’t turn around without seeing Randall, without recalling too vividly the way his shoulders tense under her touch, without seeing a file that said—

Christ. She needs a drink.

“I never told him,” Bel whispers sometime in the early hours as the sky lightens the merest fraction. “I wrote it in a letter, but I didn’t send it, I couldn’t, I—he’s always been the brave one. He’s always believed. And if he—oh, God, Lix.”

Bel cracks then, her shoulders shaking silently as she turns her face away, and Lix doesn’t say a word. There’s nothing to say, really. It’s the same sort of crumbling she’d watched in Randall’s office, the same breaking rockslide she feels in her own chest. It’s the risk you take when you love something. Someone. When you let yourself hope, dream of possibility.

There’s a reason she tries to avoid those things.

“Excuse me, Miss Rowley?” There’s a doctor in a white coat, face drawn and harried, but not with the polite mask of someone about to give devastating news.

Bel wipes under her eyes and Lix takes her hand for extra support when it shakes.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Lyon is out of surgery. There was a lot of damage, but we did what we could. He’s sleeping now. You’re welcome to sit in his room if you’d like.”

“Yes. Yes, I—yes. Thank you.”

“Do you want me to stay?” Lix asks quietly. Bel shakes her head and squeezes her hand.

“Only if you want to.”

She stays long enough to look in on Freddie—he’s pale and fragile in the hospital bed, surrounded by beeping machines and tubes of varying nature, a far cry from his usual self—and then makes her excuses. But she doesn’t go home. She means to. But she walks to clear her head, passes the studio on her way—there’s a light on in an upper office. A familiar office.

She aches.

“Have coffee with me?” She leans against the doorway, dead on her feet, certain that she looks every bit her age without even a fresh dash of lipstick to distract from it.

Randall looks up from his desk, neatly arranged once more, not a pen out of place.

“You haven’t slept.” It’s not a question. Lix shrugs.

“Neither have you,” she replies, reading the truth of it in the shadows under his eyes.

“Alright.”

And it hurts just the slightest bit less.


End file.
